During the 1990’s, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor emerged as one of the most tortured voices in modern rock with seminal industrial albums like The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, answering the prayers of all those who wanted to see the music of the 80’s crushed more brutally than “Smells Like Teen Spirit” could accomplish.
He sold a gazillion records at the time, but the biggest vote of confidence in his artistic potency the fact that he’s still front-page material so many years after Stabbing Westward sold their drum machines to buy groceries. Since parting ways with his record label late last year following a complete flip-out during his last tour of Australia over the predatory pricing of his albums down under, Reznor’s complete inversion of conventional music business logic has led him to give away his last couple albums, subsequently challenge his fans to remix them, intentionally leak songs by leaving USB flash drives in venue bathrooms, and give away tickets by hiding them and telling fans the location via Google Earth.
One common and entirely reasonably criticism of his ongoing grabs for attention — and they are many — is that he can only afford to take these risks because conventional record labels first turned him into a superstar. That’s true enough, but until other bands start doing this sort of thing regularly, you kinda have to let that slide and just smile as he sets the example.
Nine Inch Nails - Echoplex
Nine Inch Nails - Demon Seed
Nine Inch Nails - The Four Of Us Are Dying
Nine Inch Nails - 3 Ghosts I
Nine Inch Nails - 7 Ghosts I
Nine Inch Nails - 8 Ghosts I
L.A. experimental rock quartet HEALTH opens.
buy tickets onlineCharlottesville rock quartet and Palmyra indie trio
Irish folk
King Golden Banshee - Greenland Whale Fisheries
King Golden Banshee - Rakish Paddy/Dick Gossips/Toss The Feathers
King Golden Banshee - The Wild Rover
King Golden Banshee - Tripping Up The Stairs/Banish Misfortune/Gillian’s Apples
King Golden Banshee - Knocknaboul Polkas
King Golden Banshee - O’Rourk’s Reel/Farewell To Eireann
The band behind those Thursday karaoke sessions hosts a jam session. Bring your axe, even if you think you’ll be a wallflower here, because you never know…
Staunton-based Motown revivalist
The Bootsie Daniels Band - Rooster In The Hen House
The local guitarist performs with members of Modern Groove Syndicate and the Retrospective Collective, among others.
Tom-Waitsy former American Dumpster frontman Christian Breeden and local bassist Dave Bartok head up a new rock project which we suspect is named after the current administration — and when you’ve got those two scolding you, you know something has gone terribly wrong.
Multi-instrumentalist Matty Metcalfe reps New Orleans with flavors derived from (and tunes composed by) Professor Longhair, Allan Toussaint, and the Meters, among others.
Matty Metcalfe - Big Chief
Matty Metcalfe - Chez Seychelles
Matty Metcalfe - Happy Two-Step
Pokey LaFarge plays folk and blues with a light touch of ragtime.
Pokey LaFarge - Sweet Seventeen
One more week with the longest-lived Americana band in town
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Talk To Me, Baby
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Glamour Girl
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Hunky Dorey
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Marvin’s Water
Local guitarist Matthew Willner tangles with a rotating cast of supporting musicians.
Local guitarist Matthew Willner tangles with a rotating cast of supporting musicians.
The Misery Brothers play soul covers from the likes of Sam and Dave and Otis Redding and original country written by guitarist Joe Adkins.
Birdlips is an enchanting local indie-folk duo defined by 12-string guitar, keys, and intertwined vocal harmonies.
Birdlips - Tire Chains
Birdlips - Some Kind Of Death
Also featuring cheesehead folkies (not an insult) The Championship.
The final performance of the Foundation’s annual festival consists of two string quartets and one composition for eight pieces.
The pianists perform Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor and Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for violin and piano, the latter accompanied by violinist Jennifer Koh.
Clarinetist plays Mozart and then some
The top-shelf percussionist improvises on an amplified cardboard tube with local violinist Tim Summers and then performs alongside a keyboard and string ensemble for Giovanni Sollima’s Spasimo, which recounts the history of an Italian church.
Virginia folk rock quartet named after a pygmy forest ritual
Even though they’re celebrating the release of their second album, the Falsies are in trouble, sort of — their moral foundation is crumbling. And that’s saying quite a lot given that they send us songs called “Are You Sexually Available” and have a locally famous anthem called… well, just go see for yourself.
“The whole premise of the band was that we didn’t really play our instruments, kind of like this balance of humor and good songs,” says frontman Peter Markush, “It was still entertaining even though the instruments weren’t played very well.”
The “problem,” then is that during the time that has elapsed since their debut, they’ve all learned to play their instruments better, they have a new guitarist and bassist who Markush says are more skilled, and most importantly, they learned to work together as an outfit.
“We decided to present ourselves as not-sloppy, as a real band,” says Markush. “Once we get to where these songs actually sound good, we kinda like it that way.”
As Markush puts it, this kind of makes them “false Falsies.” Still, if this new one is anywhere near as entertaining as The Real Fake Things, you’re in for a treat. “Even if we were as tight as Rush, there’s a lot of humor and personality locked up in these songs,” promises drummer/chicken Lance Brenner.
The Falsies - Are You Sexually Available
Straight Punch To The Crotch opens, which no doubt means that each band will spend the whole night trying to out-absurd the other. We’d like to bet on the chicken here, but Billy’s keyboard doubles as a flamethrower, so who knows.
Straight Punch To The Crotch - Robot Baby
Straight Punch To The Crotch - When Animals Attack
Straight Punch To The Crotch - Summer Sun and Firecrackers
Samba and Latin tunes from the two local guitarists
Rapunzel’s calls this young folk and alt-country duo a more upbeat version of David Rawlings and Gillian Welch.
Carl Anderson and Carleigh Nesbit - 3 Steps Out The Door [live]
Carl Anderson and Carleigh Nesbit - No Easy Way To Say It [live]
Nesbit is also fairly active as a soloist, so it’s probably safe to expect a number of tunes from her debut album.
Carleigh Nesbit - Three Steps Out The Door
Carleigh Nesbit - River Run Dry
Carleigh Nesbit - Turn On The Heat
Carleigh Nesbit - Your City Skies
Carleigh Nesbit - Three Steps Out The Door [live, with Carl Anderson]
Wrenn Mangum is sometimes a rockabilly singer and sometimes an Elvis impersonator. Betcha can’t guess which we’re hoping for.
Bluesy roots-rock
The Rogan Brothers - Into The Light
The Rogan Brothers - Heartbeat
The Rogan Brothers - Hang Tough
The latest project from former Hackensaw Boys member Philip St. Ours
Jam led by local guitar wizard Tucker Rogers
Space Cadet 7 - Killer Octopus
Red-hot guitarist Eli Cook will put aside his usual blues-meets-grunge thing and instead play a Hendrix set at the Four-County Players Theater. Eli covered “Castles Made Of Sand” on a record a few years back, and even told us a while back that he sometimes has dreams where Jimi comes and teaches him how to play the songs. Depending on how superstitious you are, that might mean he has a leg up on all those other versions of “Watchtower.”
After long affairs with hairstyling and classical music John Carden has settled on jazz. Keep an eye out for a number of local jazz wizards in his backing band.
Lee Alter’s new exhibit of graphite and watercolor artwork opens with a bang — local rock ‘n roll bluegrass quartet 6 Day Bender will be on hand to emcee the hootin’ and hollerin’.
The hard-driving local quartet splits the difference between rock and bluegrass to get something they call “mountain rock ‘n roll.” Shows in this are have been pretty scarce until recently, so catch them while you can.
6 Day Bender - Kick Out The Fire
Charlottesville’s most brazenly pop-minded local rock band.
The Sometime Favorites - All Along
The Sometime Favorites - What You Wanted
Beside the under-construction Landmark Hotel, Damani Harrison of the locally-based hip-hop group Beetnix prepares to shoot a video tonight on the Downtown Mall. Shortly before 7pm, using a none-too-loud boom box to keep time, the band— “one for the money, two for the brain, three for the pain”— walked the Mall rapping “Citizen Kane.”
Hootie and the Blowfish’s major-label debut Cracked Rear View outsold Dave Matthews Band’s Under the Table and Dreaming by 7 million copies.When both Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish burst onto the national scene with their major label debuts in 1994, it seemed there wouldn’t be room for the two of them on the charts. Both came from southern college towns (Charlottesville and Columbia, South Carolina), both played a folk-infused brand of feel-good music, and both had captured the attention of mainstream radio listeners with an infectious debut single.
DMB’s “What Would You Say” didn’t crack the top 10, while Hootie’s “Hold My Hand” went all the way to #2 on the Billboard singles chart. Three more top 10 singles propelled Hootie’s Cracked Rear View to sales of 11 million copies in the U.S. alone, tied with Boston’s self-titled album for the best-selling debut release of all time. DMB’s Under the Table and Dreaming sold an impressive– but not as earth-shattering– 4 million copies.
Indeed, there wasn’t room for both.
Hootie’s follow-up, Fairweather Johnson, sold (more)
As a soft but steady rain– the first in more than a month– fell on his hometown yesterday morning, friends and family of LeRoi Moore filed into Charlottesville’s biggest church to remember the late Dave Matthews Band saxophonist, who died August 19 from injuries suffered June 30 in an all-terrain vehicle accident on his farm outside town.
Eulogizing Moore was the Rev. Dr. William Guthrie, the former rector of Moore’s family church, Trinity Episcopal. Guthrie revealed that the accident had put Moore into a coma, but that he occsionally awakened to greet well-wishers, both in Charlottesville and in Los Angeles where he had a second home and was to begin a long rehabilitation program.
“In Los Angeles,” said Guthrie, “he suffered a fatal embolism that would eventually take his life.”
Though nearly 1,000 people turned out to say goodbye to Moore, only the four men seated (more)
LeRoi Moore: 1961-2008One song into his band’s set at the Los Angeles Staples Center on Tuesday, August 19, Dave Matthews managed to silence the nearly 20,000 fans.
“We got some bad news today,” he told the crowd. “LeRoi gave up his ghost.”
Hours before Matthews had uttered the words, Dave Matthews Band saxophonist and founding member LeRoi Moore passed away in a hospital bed at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, just six miles from the Staples Center, from complications from an accident. In June, Moore suffered broken ribs and a collapsed lung in an all-terrain vehicle accident on his farm outside Charlottesville. He was 46 years old.
The news hit his native Charlottesville hard, especially those who knew Moore well.
“It’s been an incredibly difficult couple of days,” says Peter Griesar, keyboardist and original bandmate of Moore’s in DMB. “He was (more)
The Cavalier Marching Band has been getting some pre-season help from members from David Letterman’s house band.
Lead trumpeter Al Chez, for instance, shown here at left chatting with Marching Band director Bill Pease, has been part of the Late Show with David Letterman for twelve years. But he’s been here all week while Letterman’s on break during the Olympics, coaching some of the now 260-strong Marching Band members. Why?
“I grew up doing marching band,” Chez said this morning in a sideline interview. “And it gave me a career.”
Pease hopes that students will be inspired by Chez, who didn’t major in music. “It’s not about a degree,” says Pease. “It’s about passion.”
Eight days from now, Chez’s bandmate Sid McGinness will give a special guitar performance during the half-time show at UVA’s first home football game, against the University of Southern California at Scott Stadium. Each fall football game, Pease notes, will feature a fresh half-time show.
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While they may march to a slightly different drummer, composer and singer John Carden believes he’s every bit as Olympian as champion Michael Phelps– “Being a classical singer is like being an Olympic athlete– it’s a high-wire act,” he says.
And for Carden, who may not win any gold medals, his life as a musician is every bit as rewarding as Phelps’ world records. After pursing an internationally renowned career as an opera singer, Carden has recently changed his tune and begun to study and perform American jazz with local icon pianist/organist George Melvin.
“Jazz is the type of music I love most,” Carden says. “It incorporates every culture, and it’s such a non-divisive art form– it’s truly a unique phenomenon.”
At a Keswick Hall concert last Christmas Eve, Carden found himself pulled onstage by Melvin to stand beside the pianist and lead the packed hall in song. When the chance meeting led Carden to join Melvin at his weekly sessions at South Street Brewery soon after the holidays, Carden began pursing jazz as a new twist on his classical opera training.
As his study with Melvin blossomed, Carden founded his jazz group, Greenwich Swing Time, in April. Composed of various local jazz legends– from Melvin on piano to Humberto Sales on Latin guitar– Greenwich Swing Time has found its niche in Charlottesville’s music scene, according to Carden.
“I wondered if anyone today would be interested” he says, “but we saw in short order that we were getting lots of interest and bookings.”
Wrapping up his first jazz album– John Carden: The George Melvin Sessions– Carden has found the switch from opera to jazz to be as smooth as his voice under the tutelage of Melvin and Sales.
“They are his [Melvin's] arrangements,” he says of the album. “I’m there to facilitate what he wants to express.”
Learning from others is not all Carden has been up to lately.
A year ago, at an open house fund-raiser for friend Beth Neville Evans’ Ixtatan Foundation School, Carden approached Evans with a request to teach hair-cuttery at the school. But Evans turned on him with a similar request– for him to also teach music.
And so he spent the month of July teaching 165 children in San Mateo in Guatemala’s highlands, and he has returned with a heightened sense of pride and appreciation for his music.
“Music is my purpose,” he says. “The key to happiness for everyone is to live your life so you go to the one thing you love. That’s what music is for me.”
As a composer, a singer, even a haircutter, Carden continues to grow as a person and an artist. Taking the stage on Friday, he expects his style of jazz to have a lasting impact.
“You hear jazz everywhere– a retail store, a restaurant, at dinner parties– it’s a universal music,” he says with pride. “Even though executives at record companies dismiss it as old-time music, it seems to have a better shelf life– and that resonates with me.”
John Carden and Greenwich Swing Time perform at Fridays After Five on August 22. The Matthew Willner Quartet opens.
With the help of substitute touring sax player Jeff Coffin, DMB went ahead with their scheduled show in LA on the night LeRoi Moore died, where Dave had the unenviable task of breaking the news to a house full of fans who were, up until that point, blissfully unaware. One review of the performance even jumped right away to calling the band a quartet.
As usual, the show was recorded by fans, and as of this morning you can finally download it using BitTorrent.
DMB at the Staples Center 2008-08-19
Note: this is a .torrent file which will download the audio for you when opened in a BitTorrent client; one great option for Windows is uTorrent, and Mac users can try Transmission. The audio files are in the awesome high-res FLAC format, which means you’ll need to use something like VLC or Winamp to play them.
The Waybacks are a popular Americana band which plays country, bluegrass, and western swing, among other things.
buy tickets onlineDave Barnes is known as much for his stage banter as he is for his songwriting, which is Nashville lightly braised with R&B.
buy tickets onlineFredricksburg-born blues singer Gaye Adegbalola celebrates her new album, “Gaye Without Shame,” which is as thematically deep as it is stylistically diverse — she legitimately battled her way through the civil rights movement, after all, so what else would you expect?
Brady Earnhardt, John Ashley, and Andy Moore open.
buy tickets onlineYou probably don’t know James Jackson Toth, but you may know Wooden Wand, the duo he founded with his sister back when “freak-folk” was still just a dreadlocked glimmer in Devendra’s eye. Toth has since struck out on his own with his solo debut “Waiting In Vain,” which features contributions from Vetiver and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. At $7, this is a steal.
Punk-rock turned indie-folk act The Dutchess And The Duke opens.
The Dutchess and the Duke - Reservoir Park
buy tickets onlineFredricksburg native Erin McKeown plays folk-pop peppered with remarkable guitar work and an occasional twinge of Ani DiFranco-style aggression, likely picked up when they toured together back in 2005. Her 2006 album “Sing You Sinners” consisted of mostly jazz standards, and on this tour you’ll also get to hear her road-test new original material from the album due out this fall.
Brooklyn indie Americana singer Rebecca Pronsky opens.
buy tickets onlineBrad Perry’s local punk rock quartet Worn In Red kicks off its latest tour blitz. Also featuring The Unholy Four and spacey local riff-happy metalheads A Cosmonauts Ruin.
Worn In Red - Vital Joys
A Cosmonaut’s Ruin - Sanctum
A Cosmonaut’s Ruin - Sinking Of Elders
Local rock wunderkind Adam Smith of Truman Sparks fame performs with his solo project. Also featuring energetic Durham indie rockers Red Collar and Charlottesville’s own Vamanos.
Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand - There’s Room In My Will
Red Collar - Hands Up!
Red Collar - Used Guitars
Five-piece acoustic-oriented Latin rock fusion centered around a pair of transplanted Chileans, occasionally featuring exotic folklore and Andean folk instruments.
Bridgeland - Come Dream Again
Bridgeland - Desde el Valle
Hot gypsy jazz from the local guitar player.
Olivarez Trio - Double Whiskey
This local blues band is a C-ville staple.
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Talk To Me, Baby
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Glamour Girl
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Hunky Dorey
The Chickenhead Blues Band - Marvin’s Water
Local multi-instrumentalist Peter Markush goes into old-time mode with fiddle player Marc Perdue.
Gypsy and Klezmer music. Also featuring Accordion Death Squad.
Accordion Death Squad - Di, Margule, Di
The Biscuit Rollers play classic blues descended from Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and R.L. Burnside. They do it pretty well, apparently: they just won first place at the James River Blues Competition and will be moving up to the next round in early 2009.
The Biscuit Rollers - France Blues
The Biscuit Rollers - Kokomo/Write Me A Few More Lines
Salsa and Cuban dance music
buy tickets online
These six blues-rock jammers sometimes wander out into reggae and bluegrass.
Raw Dawg - Alibi
Raw Dawg - Dig
Raw Dawg - HOI
Well, at least he warned us — the new Ryan-Adams-gone-wrong band fronted by Rob Cheatham of The Nice Jenkins has gone and changed its name from “Nun-chucks” to “Gunchux.” And we thought they were already pretty dangerous before…
Less than two months after an ATV accident on his Charlottesville area farm, Dave Matthews Band saxophonist LeRoi Moore has died from unexpected complications stemming from his injuries, according to numerous internet reports. On June 30, Moore was seriously injured while riding his all terrain vehicle on his farm outside Charlottesville. Initially listed in critical condition, Moore was released from the hospital several weeks later, only to return to UVA medical center on July 21, reportedly with complications from a collapsed lung.
According to a release from the Dave Matthews Band publicist on TMZ.com, Moore died unexpectedly today in Los Angeles at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, where he had recently returned “to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.”
The Dave Matthews Band was scheduled to play a concert at the Staples Center in L.A. tonight. At posting time, the status of that concert is unknown.
Here we have the can’t-miss show of the week, and by a mile and a half: the fine gents at the C-ville Music Showcase have collected two years of Wednesday night energy into a single midweek anniversary blowout, with two stages running all day and jammed full of performances by your favorite and soon-to-be-favorite local rockers (and then some — keep an ear out for sets by DJ Deep See and the Duck Brothers).
Take-no-prisoners rockers The Kings Of Belmont headline the main stage, jammy jazz band sesshin leads the second, and in between you’ll find Willie Walter with his big ol’ band, blues-rock jams from Raw Dawg, singer-songwriter Travis Elliott, folk-rock duo Birdlips, guitar-bashin’ chick Lola Mullen, and songwriter John Pringle.
MP3s? Sure thing, daddy-o. Open wide:
The Kings Of Belmont - The Jerk Store [demo]
The Kings Of Belmont - Git R Done
The Kings Of Belmont - South Bound
The Kings Of Belmont - Beg For More
The Kings Of Belmont - Sway
Birdlips - Tire Chains
Birdlips - Some Kind Of Death
Space Cadet 7 - Killer Octopus
Lola Mullen - Split Wide Open
Raw Dawg - Alibi
Raw Dawg - Dig
Raw Dawg - HOI
sesshin - Caravan
William Walter and Company - Sunflower [live]
William Walter and Company - All The Best [live]
William Walter and Company - Alright [live]
William Walter and Company - Border Crosser [live]
Clare Quilty and Dirty Dishes vocalist Jenn Rhubright sings jazz standards accompanied by pianist Gerrit Roessler and a hot new rhythm section in Jive Katze, now performing as a quartet, which donates all its proceeds to Hurricane Katrina relief projects.
Local rock outfit featuring Jason Pollock, former guitarist for late-breaking 90’s grunge band Seven Mary Three.
The Pollocks - Behind The Songs I Can’t Write
The Pollocks - Negative Blood
The Pollocks - Breathless
The Pollocks - Black Behind Blue
Blue Dogs means roots-rock, country, and bluegrass, usually with intimidating vocal harmonies and sometimes with a healthy sense of humor.
Blue Dogs - Isabelle [live]
Blue Dogs - Half Of My Mistakes [live]
Peyton Tochterman opens.
Peyton Tochterman - Mamma’s Genes
Knowing that local songwriter Keith Morris labored over his debut album for years makes for an even stranger listening experience, because “Candyapolis” projects a childish playfulness rather than tortured genius or labored inspiration. That makes it just as appropriate for kids as it is for adults, though; the Candyapolis Revue, then, is the most obvious way to restate the project: aimed explicitly at the wee ones, complete with big fuzzy bunnies and funny skits in between the songs.
buy tickets onlineCelebrated Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen maintains a mildly awkward authenticity in his music which has helped him carve out his niche as much as any of his albums. Twangy ass-kicking local country-rockers Sons Of Bill open, most likely aiming to convince you that you actually do like country just before Keen takes to the stage.
Gypsy jazz and regular jazz (whatever that is) from two rising stars of the local scene.
Olivarez Trio - Double Whiskey
buy tickets onlineJazz and bluegrass from guitarist Adam Larrabee, who has played with Bruce Hornsby and Bela Fleck, and Old School Freight Train six-string wizard Jesse Harper.
buy tickets onlineFormer Monticello Road guitarist
buy tickets onlineEver since his doctor told him he had only a few months to live, david m. bailey has been making his way in the world primarily by singing uplifting folk songs. It’s been eleven years since then. Coincidence?
david m. bailey - One More Day
david m. bailey - Dreaming Of Joy
Singer-songwriter Peter Bradley Adams plays gentle, intimate acoustic ballads which often pit emotional depth against compositional subtlety with no clear winner.
buy tickets online
Bluegrass and Americana
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Sue Cow
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Banty Rooster Blues
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Who Killed Poor Robin
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Rocksalt N’ Nails
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Pick Poor Robin Clean
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Kentucky Moonshiner
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Mission To Moscow
The Buzzard Hollow Boys - Why Don’t You Do Right
The Visitations are a lesser-known Elephant 6 band which surrounds frontman Davey Wrathgabar with an assortment of musicians who all like to play odd, often political, always geeky folk.
The Visitations - Bony Maurine
The Visitations - The Conundrum Tree
The Visitations - There Was Sunshine
Local quartet Catfish Jones plays rootsy rock and funk.
Catfish Jones - Red Flag
Catfish Jones - Swimming With Catfish
Catfish Jones - Here I Go Again
